Self-knowledge: a brief narrative review
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Abstract
In the late nineteenth century, William James wrote one of the first and most inspiring documents on self-knowledge in the history of modern psychology. However, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the literature on self-concept definitively placed self-knowledge as a subject for systematic scientific research. Since then, research has not stopped and, especially from the 80s of the 20th century onwards, important contributions have been offering new directions until today. A non-exhaustive narrative review of some of these contributions and new directions is presented here. Among others, it addresses the multiplicity and diversity of the representations we build about ourselves; its structural organization, from a static and reified structure to the most recent conceptualizations of a dynamic structure; the stability of self-knowledge but also its variability; or the relationship of self-knowledge to adaptation, or its adaptive functions; and a note on some recent contributions of cognitive neurosciences. In conclusion, research and theories of self-knowledge have been building paths of reconciliation with the complexity of each individual’s experience of himself and the conceptual richness of the first authors, largely due to the advances also registered in the fields of research methodologies and data analysis.
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